The first Distinguished Lecture Series at UCLA of this academic year is being given this week by my good friend and fellow Medalist Charlie Fefferman, who also happens to be my “older brother” (we were both students of Elias Stein). The theme of Charlie’s lectures is “Interpolation of functions on “, in the spirit of the classical Whitney extension theorem, except that now one is considering much more quantitative and computational extension problems (in particular, viewing the problem from a theoretical computer science perspective). Today Charlie introduced the basic problems in this subject, and stated some of the results of his jointwork with Bo’az Klartag; he will continue the lectures on Thursday and Friday.

The general topic of extracting quantitative bounds from classical qualitative theorems is a subject that I am personally very fond of, and Charlie gave a wonderfully accessible presentation of the main results, though the actual details of the proofs were left to the next two lectures.

As usual, all errors and omissions here are my responsibility, and are not due to Charlie.

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